Agorism
01-08-2011, 04:32 PM
A conservative civil war over CPAC?
click audio to listen---->
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0111/47231.html
http://images.politico.com/global/news/110107_norquist_keene_ap_328.jpg
Friction between parts of the social conservative and libertarian wings of the conservative movement has escalated into a shooting war in the run-up to the Conservative Political Action Conference, with accusations of embezzlement (true), homosexuality (true), and creeping sharia (disputed) hurled against the 38-year old conservative institution.
CPAC’s leaders respond that its foes’ real gripe is that it won’t give a platform to their lunatic conspiracy theories about presidential birth certificates (disputed).
But however esoteric the disputes, the fracas has led to real-world repercussions: a move by a group of conservative figures to begin organizing a move to turn the Value Voter Summit, a newer annual event planned for October, into a full-fledged rival to CPAC by shifting its focus toward economic and security issues, according to two participants in the developing strategy. Two of the heavyweight groups of the broader right, the Heritage Foundation and the Media Research Center, have dropped out of CPAC and are expected, planners said, to add to the Value Voter Summit’s heft.
And with CPAC scheduled for Feb. 10, the presidential hopefuls scheduled to speak there – including Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels , Tim Pawlenty, and Mitt Romney – will take the stage against the backdrop of a puzzlingly heated intramural conflict.
The proximate cause of the explosion is the inclusion in CPAC of the combative gay conservative group GOProud. But if the sheer intensity of the quarrel seems disproportionate to that seemingly straightforward dispute, that’s because it’s also deeply personal. Long-simmering resentment of two of the leading figures on the economic right, American Conservative Union Chairman David Keene – who runs the event — and Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, who has long been involved in planning it, has morphed into a conflict that carries the special bitterness of a civil war.
“There are a lot of conservatives who see a larger problem with Grover Norquist and David Keene, and they’ve decided to fight it out and CPAC is a proxy for that,” said Erick Erickson, the publisher of RedState.org, who said he won’t be participating in the conference because he wants to stay out of the conflict. “The underlying question is whether the conservative movement still has strong planks for social conservatism and national security conservatism. But it has also become very personal.”
“If you’ve been around this town for a long time, as I have you’ve got people who disagree with you substantively and you’ve got people who don’t like you and if you hang around long enough, their numbers increase,” said Keene, who dismissed many of the attacks as residing in “the fever swamps” of the website WorldNetDaily.
“It’s no secret that some social conservatives are very upset at the idea that there would be any participation by any organization that’s gay, but over the course of the 37 or 38 years that CPAC’s been in existence we’ve had all kinds of people suggest that other people ought to be tossed out,” he said. “Our mission is once a year to allow social, economic, and national security conservatives to come together.”
The differences are among longtime allies. Cleta Mitchell, a campaign finance lawyer who has been a leading internal critic, sits on CPAC’s board. (“ There are issues to be worked out and playing those out in the press doesn’t help from my perspective,” she told POLITICO in a brief e-mail.)
Brent Bozell, who heads the Media Research Center, long had a prominent role at the event, has emerged as another leading critic.
“It’s a small handful of people making very dangerous decisions,” he said in an interview, accusing Keene and his allies of “not just horrible policy, but suicidal politics.”
nd social conservative groups that haven’t been heavily involved in CPAC, like the Family Research Council, which runs the Values Voter Summit, have hurried to capitalize on the conflict.
The gripes with Keene and Norquist are numerous. Keene does work for corporate clients, and many conservatives were particularly unhappy with a leaked proposal to do work on behalf of FedEx in a regulatory fight with UPS. The parts of the right focused on fears of infiltration of America by radical Muslims object to Norquist’s efforts to bring Muslims into the Republican Party, and speak often – on background – of his Palestinian wife.
By Keene’s telling, the dispute is of fresher vintage. Last fall, Joseph Farah, the publisher of WorldNetDaily, which blends conservative news, UFO theorizing and a focus on President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, emailed one of Keene’s deputies to suggest a panel on the birth certificate. The ACU, which runs CPAC, rebuffed him, and he’s held a grudge ever since, Keene contends.
Farah said his grudge doesn’t date to the rebuff, but to CPAC’s decision to boast about excluding him to a Los Angeles Times reporter.
And he said the issue with CPAC is broader than the inclusion of the gay group.
“I don’t think its just GOProud,” he said. “I think there are real concerns that this conference has either become the vision of one man or a small clique.”
And Farah has also scored some direct hits on Keene, notably obtaining and posting the ACU’s tax return, which indicates that the organization suspects an employee - Keene confirmed that the person is Keene’s ex-wife, who was the bookkeeper - of misappropriating a reported $400,000.
Keene said the discovery “shocked everybody” and that he had recused himself from the investigation into the alleged theft, over a period of years, but that he had been divorced from the woman for the period in question.
“I was surprised that they hadn’t caught the fact that my older brother was arrested for drunk driving when he was in college 50 years ago,” Keene said of the WorldNetDaily reporting on him.
More debatable, in any event, was the allegation, aired this earlier week on WorldNetDaily, that CPAC has “come under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is working to bring America under Saudi-style Shariah law,” in the person of a former Bush administration official, Suhail Khan, who leads a group called Muslims for America.
Former Reagan administration official Frank Gaffney, who levied the charge, didn’t respond to a call for comment.
The notion that CPAC should be attacked for simultaneously promoting gay rights and restrictive Islamic law drew ridicule from Keene’s allies.
“The idea that ‘homosexual activists’ are working with ‘Muslim terrorists’ to infiltrate CPAC and subvert the conservative movement is beyond bizarre. I assume the end game is to install the gay Sharia agenda?” said the chairman of GOProud, Chris Barron. “It’s hard to tell the difference between his website – World Net Daily – and the Onion these days.
CPAC’s supporters suggest that its critics are the groups that risk being cast aside as conservatism moves forward: Birthers, surely, but also the elements of the right who actively fight same-sex marriage.
But those socially conservative groups remain large elements of the conservative movement, and while the new tea party has a fiscal focus, polling suggests its members are overwhelmingly also Christian conservatives. Some Christian conservative groups, like the Family Research Council – has long eschewed CPAC, and others, like Concerned Women for America, have dropped out and come back before.
“We are concerned about the high-level of participation by a group that is actively working to harm a couple of legs of the conservative movement,” said Wendy Wright, the executive director of Concerned Women for America.
And in CPAC, personal animus has met a very real battle over the meaning of conservatism.
“Conservative and Republican elites are trying to run away from issues that are important to the base, that are important to our culture and there’s a need to continue to force awareness of this and to force a full conservatism to move forward,” said Andy Blom, the executive director of the new American Principles Project, which was involved in a similar skirmish to ensure that social issues were included in the text of the Cognressional Republicans Pledge to America last year.
Some of CPAC’s younger participants, however, support GOProud’s attendance.
“I think it’s kind of representative of what’s happening our movement. Some say the youth are moving away from social conservatism,” and Jordan Marks, the executive director of Young Americans for Freedom, which is participating in the event. “The movement is going through growing pains right now.
And others find the intensity of the fight frankly puzzling.
“I think there is a beef there. I think GOProud got caught in the crossfire,” said Terri Christoph, the founder of the group Smart Girl Politics.
But the ruckus is leaving its mark, even among those who plan to attend.
“The CPAC staff has allowed fringe groups and issues to become the focus of discussion. CPAC was formed to be a forum for the conservative mainstream and its leadership will have to give assurances to its major sponsors that it understands that priority or it will not be the major conservative conference for long,” said Ron Robinson, the president of Young America’s Foundation and a director of the ACU, who said his group “remains a full sponsor” and “will work to reform CPAC’s decision making process.”
And the rebels say that presidential candidates who attend CPAC should tread lightly.
“We would not want the presidential candidates to boycott CPAC,” said Jeffrey Bell, a veteran conservative activist who is policy director of the American Principles Proect. “ I would advise that candidate to go — but also to talk about more than just deficits.”
An earlier version of this article stated that Grover Norquist does work for corporate clients; he has not had personal clients for a decade, his spokesman said.
click audio to listen---->
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0111/47231.html
http://images.politico.com/global/news/110107_norquist_keene_ap_328.jpg
Friction between parts of the social conservative and libertarian wings of the conservative movement has escalated into a shooting war in the run-up to the Conservative Political Action Conference, with accusations of embezzlement (true), homosexuality (true), and creeping sharia (disputed) hurled against the 38-year old conservative institution.
CPAC’s leaders respond that its foes’ real gripe is that it won’t give a platform to their lunatic conspiracy theories about presidential birth certificates (disputed).
But however esoteric the disputes, the fracas has led to real-world repercussions: a move by a group of conservative figures to begin organizing a move to turn the Value Voter Summit, a newer annual event planned for October, into a full-fledged rival to CPAC by shifting its focus toward economic and security issues, according to two participants in the developing strategy. Two of the heavyweight groups of the broader right, the Heritage Foundation and the Media Research Center, have dropped out of CPAC and are expected, planners said, to add to the Value Voter Summit’s heft.
And with CPAC scheduled for Feb. 10, the presidential hopefuls scheduled to speak there – including Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels , Tim Pawlenty, and Mitt Romney – will take the stage against the backdrop of a puzzlingly heated intramural conflict.
The proximate cause of the explosion is the inclusion in CPAC of the combative gay conservative group GOProud. But if the sheer intensity of the quarrel seems disproportionate to that seemingly straightforward dispute, that’s because it’s also deeply personal. Long-simmering resentment of two of the leading figures on the economic right, American Conservative Union Chairman David Keene – who runs the event — and Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, who has long been involved in planning it, has morphed into a conflict that carries the special bitterness of a civil war.
“There are a lot of conservatives who see a larger problem with Grover Norquist and David Keene, and they’ve decided to fight it out and CPAC is a proxy for that,” said Erick Erickson, the publisher of RedState.org, who said he won’t be participating in the conference because he wants to stay out of the conflict. “The underlying question is whether the conservative movement still has strong planks for social conservatism and national security conservatism. But it has also become very personal.”
“If you’ve been around this town for a long time, as I have you’ve got people who disagree with you substantively and you’ve got people who don’t like you and if you hang around long enough, their numbers increase,” said Keene, who dismissed many of the attacks as residing in “the fever swamps” of the website WorldNetDaily.
“It’s no secret that some social conservatives are very upset at the idea that there would be any participation by any organization that’s gay, but over the course of the 37 or 38 years that CPAC’s been in existence we’ve had all kinds of people suggest that other people ought to be tossed out,” he said. “Our mission is once a year to allow social, economic, and national security conservatives to come together.”
The differences are among longtime allies. Cleta Mitchell, a campaign finance lawyer who has been a leading internal critic, sits on CPAC’s board. (“ There are issues to be worked out and playing those out in the press doesn’t help from my perspective,” she told POLITICO in a brief e-mail.)
Brent Bozell, who heads the Media Research Center, long had a prominent role at the event, has emerged as another leading critic.
“It’s a small handful of people making very dangerous decisions,” he said in an interview, accusing Keene and his allies of “not just horrible policy, but suicidal politics.”
nd social conservative groups that haven’t been heavily involved in CPAC, like the Family Research Council, which runs the Values Voter Summit, have hurried to capitalize on the conflict.
The gripes with Keene and Norquist are numerous. Keene does work for corporate clients, and many conservatives were particularly unhappy with a leaked proposal to do work on behalf of FedEx in a regulatory fight with UPS. The parts of the right focused on fears of infiltration of America by radical Muslims object to Norquist’s efforts to bring Muslims into the Republican Party, and speak often – on background – of his Palestinian wife.
By Keene’s telling, the dispute is of fresher vintage. Last fall, Joseph Farah, the publisher of WorldNetDaily, which blends conservative news, UFO theorizing and a focus on President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, emailed one of Keene’s deputies to suggest a panel on the birth certificate. The ACU, which runs CPAC, rebuffed him, and he’s held a grudge ever since, Keene contends.
Farah said his grudge doesn’t date to the rebuff, but to CPAC’s decision to boast about excluding him to a Los Angeles Times reporter.
And he said the issue with CPAC is broader than the inclusion of the gay group.
“I don’t think its just GOProud,” he said. “I think there are real concerns that this conference has either become the vision of one man or a small clique.”
And Farah has also scored some direct hits on Keene, notably obtaining and posting the ACU’s tax return, which indicates that the organization suspects an employee - Keene confirmed that the person is Keene’s ex-wife, who was the bookkeeper - of misappropriating a reported $400,000.
Keene said the discovery “shocked everybody” and that he had recused himself from the investigation into the alleged theft, over a period of years, but that he had been divorced from the woman for the period in question.
“I was surprised that they hadn’t caught the fact that my older brother was arrested for drunk driving when he was in college 50 years ago,” Keene said of the WorldNetDaily reporting on him.
More debatable, in any event, was the allegation, aired this earlier week on WorldNetDaily, that CPAC has “come under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is working to bring America under Saudi-style Shariah law,” in the person of a former Bush administration official, Suhail Khan, who leads a group called Muslims for America.
Former Reagan administration official Frank Gaffney, who levied the charge, didn’t respond to a call for comment.
The notion that CPAC should be attacked for simultaneously promoting gay rights and restrictive Islamic law drew ridicule from Keene’s allies.
“The idea that ‘homosexual activists’ are working with ‘Muslim terrorists’ to infiltrate CPAC and subvert the conservative movement is beyond bizarre. I assume the end game is to install the gay Sharia agenda?” said the chairman of GOProud, Chris Barron. “It’s hard to tell the difference between his website – World Net Daily – and the Onion these days.
CPAC’s supporters suggest that its critics are the groups that risk being cast aside as conservatism moves forward: Birthers, surely, but also the elements of the right who actively fight same-sex marriage.
But those socially conservative groups remain large elements of the conservative movement, and while the new tea party has a fiscal focus, polling suggests its members are overwhelmingly also Christian conservatives. Some Christian conservative groups, like the Family Research Council – has long eschewed CPAC, and others, like Concerned Women for America, have dropped out and come back before.
“We are concerned about the high-level of participation by a group that is actively working to harm a couple of legs of the conservative movement,” said Wendy Wright, the executive director of Concerned Women for America.
And in CPAC, personal animus has met a very real battle over the meaning of conservatism.
“Conservative and Republican elites are trying to run away from issues that are important to the base, that are important to our culture and there’s a need to continue to force awareness of this and to force a full conservatism to move forward,” said Andy Blom, the executive director of the new American Principles Project, which was involved in a similar skirmish to ensure that social issues were included in the text of the Cognressional Republicans Pledge to America last year.
Some of CPAC’s younger participants, however, support GOProud’s attendance.
“I think it’s kind of representative of what’s happening our movement. Some say the youth are moving away from social conservatism,” and Jordan Marks, the executive director of Young Americans for Freedom, which is participating in the event. “The movement is going through growing pains right now.
And others find the intensity of the fight frankly puzzling.
“I think there is a beef there. I think GOProud got caught in the crossfire,” said Terri Christoph, the founder of the group Smart Girl Politics.
But the ruckus is leaving its mark, even among those who plan to attend.
“The CPAC staff has allowed fringe groups and issues to become the focus of discussion. CPAC was formed to be a forum for the conservative mainstream and its leadership will have to give assurances to its major sponsors that it understands that priority or it will not be the major conservative conference for long,” said Ron Robinson, the president of Young America’s Foundation and a director of the ACU, who said his group “remains a full sponsor” and “will work to reform CPAC’s decision making process.”
And the rebels say that presidential candidates who attend CPAC should tread lightly.
“We would not want the presidential candidates to boycott CPAC,” said Jeffrey Bell, a veteran conservative activist who is policy director of the American Principles Proect. “ I would advise that candidate to go — but also to talk about more than just deficits.”
An earlier version of this article stated that Grover Norquist does work for corporate clients; he has not had personal clients for a decade, his spokesman said.